I’ve just launched an unofficial forum for the Yahoo!/BBC Hack Day being held next month in London. There’s already an unofficial wiki, but there’s nothing like a bit of banter before an event 
I’ve just learned about, and signed up for, BarCampSheffield.. a BarCamp taking place in the fabulous Northern town of Sheffield in a couple of weeks. For those who aren’t familiar with BarCamps, they’re a chance for a bunch of geeks to get together, give a bundle of presentations about various things, talk, hack, drink, and basically have a really unstructured, casual get together for a day or two.
BarCampSheffield is under the careful caretakership of PlusNet, and they’ve managed to sort out 30 free (single) hotel rooms that are first come, first served.. about fifteen are left I guess, so if you want to go, now’s the time to sign up on the wiki page.
It doesn’t look like many Rubyists are going, perhaps two or three, but I’ll be there and if you want to meet up, just drop me a line or post on the BarCampSheffield forum I just threw together! All looks like it might be a lot of fun.. we’ll see!
Amazon presents you with this question when looking at certain comments on reviews left at their site. But what are they really asking? Is my answer:
* Yes, I think it doesn’t add to the discussion.
or
* Yes, I think it does add to the discussion.
By saying “Yes”, are we agreeing with the “1 person” or affirming the post adds to the discussion?
Gotta love the way negatives mess up our language, haven’t you 
There are about 2000 t-shirt concepts in here..
So these two guys (Streeter and Amir) who work for CollegeHumor.com started to have a prank war and all of it’s gone up on video sharing site Vimeo.
First up, Streeter on the attack..
Amir gets him back with a fake date..
Streeter hits back hard..
The Prank War Goes On! on Vimeo
But not as hard as Amir’s totally cruel infringement on Streeter’s side gig as a stand-up comedian..
Prank War Continued: Streeter Bombs on Vimeo
Can’t wait to see it continue.
Today, a Feed Digest user reported that his digests using IceRocket were no longer working. I looked into it, and it seems IceRocket had banned our proxy. I rigged up an alternative proxy and it worked for about 50 requests, and then that was banned too. Clearly the ban was automated, and probably reflects a new rule / policy from IceRocket.
I took a look at their robots.txt to see what the deal was, and it turns out they block ALL useragents from their /search directory, which means most of their RSS feeds can’t be used by, er.. anything. A feed reader is an automated client, much like Feed Digest is, so we’re not technically allowed to retrieve their feeds except manually with our browsers Of course, this all depends on the definition of a ‘bot’.. more on that later.
I decided to put Google Reader to the test to see if they respect robots.txt rules, and.. no! I could subscribe successfully to an IceRocket feed ( http://www.icerocket.com/search?tab=blog&q=robots&rss=1 ) from Google Reader, despite IceRocket’s robots.txt file denying it. So, at least Feed Digest isn’t alone in mostly ignoring robots.txt policy (although barely any feeds are usually covered by them since otherwise they’d be made useless) and Google Reader doesn’t follow the rules either. Difference is, Google’s a big guy and doesn’t get banned and Feed Digest is small and does. Perhaps we’ll work it out with IceRocket in a nice fashion, but the point remains and this could easily be an issue with 101 other feed providers out there in the future.
However, the remaining point is.. is a feed reader a ‘bot’? Finding a definitive answer to this isn’t easy. The original “robot exclusion” standard says:
WWW Robots (also called wanderers or spiders) are programs that traverse many pages in the World Wide Web by recursively retrieving linked pages.
In theory this means almost no feed reader is actually a “robot”, although it appears Feed Digest is being treated as such, although this definition of “robot” seems riddled with potential loopholes.
What’s the actual policy here? Are proxies, feed readers, feed “crawlers” (but not recursive ones) and so forth “robots”, “spiders”, or not? Furthermore, would an application that trawled through linked OPML files be a “robot” because it recursively retrieves OPML files? It’s a toughie, but I’m thinking there needs to be some policy set on this by the higher-ups
Last.fm telling me how unoriginal I’ve been this week.
Installing Ruby from source is my preferred method, although in Ubuntu Feisty you can supposedly install it with apt-get install ruby now. Here’s the essential packages needed to get a source build working right though and the process I just went through:
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev
sudo apt-get install libz-dev (this is necessary for RubyGems to install - amongst other things)
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6
./configure
make
make install
And to install RubyGems..
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17190/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
tar xzvf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.2
ruby setup.rb
I e-mailed several of my MEPs (Members of European Parliament) today to alert them of my opinions on a new European bill that could introduce a new criminal offence of copyright infringement. Forgetting the massive implications of criminalizing something that was previously a civil matter, it’s scary that the EU could possibly introduce new criminal offences without the public being made aware.
Within a few hours I got a response from the Liberal Democrat MEP, Bill Newton Dunn, saying that he was following his more technically minded Liberal colleagues and voting for the amendment that CopyCrime supports. Score! However, he also suggested that he didn’t like the tactics used by groups such as CopyCrime as they tended to make the EU look like a bunch of ‘wicked Eurocrats’.
I would blame the necessity of such scare mongering on a total failure to educate the general populace about European politics and, worse, the failure of governing bodies to make clear what laws are under discussion and what is likely to occur. In theory we elect representatives who have similar opinions to ourselves on these issues and trust that they will fight for these issues, but in reality there’s no one candidate who could sum up all of your views in one go, so you have to make a trade-off and trust your politicians.
I have quickly recognized that trying to fight the giant political machine of either the UK or the EU in general is a meaningless endeavor because countless numbers of political theories demonstrate why we won’t escape a two or three party system in the near future. Perhaps this is another reason to support direct democracy to some level, but what party is going to implement that? None of them (they can’t even agree on fair, proportional representation!), so we’re stuck with what we’ve got and we have to trust these guys to do the right thing because we can’t get rid of them or change the system.
The latest version of Ubuntu works a treat on OS X under VMWare Fusion.. but don’t even bother trying using Parallels. It’s atrocious. VMWare Fusion also needed some work which involved adding vga=740 to the bootflags, but after that it works great.
I'm Peter Cooper, an eccentric British sort.
